Reflections on Technology, Culture, and Christian Spirituality

Tag Archives: Figure/Ground

In a recent interview I did with the Figure/Ground project, the interviewer asked me what I thought of Stephen Marche’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” I had read the article when it first ran, so I replied that if you read it closely, this article doesn’t really argue for the position implied in the title and abstract. Although Marche starts with the assumption that Facebook is making people lonely, he ends up articulating a much more nuanced position by the end. After I explained what I meant by that, I concluded by saying, “the better question to ask is why are these kinds of articles so popular? Why are we seeing such a sudden rash of articles entitled ‘is pick-your-new-technology making us stupid/narcissistic/lonely/shallow/etc.?'”

Thankfully, the interviewer didn’t ask me to answer my own question. If he had, I’m not sure I could have given him a good answer at the time. These kinds of articles are, of course, nothing terribly new. I remember articles from my youth that asked if calculators were making us lazy, or if Sony Walkmans were making us socially isolated and possibly deaf. A trip through the newspaper archives would no doubt reveal similar articles surrounding the mass-adoption of just about any new technological device, especially those since the 1960s.

Instead of trying to engage the specific questions that these articles pose, I think it might be more interesting to ask, why are these authors framing their questions in this sort of yes/no, pro/con, good/bad way? And why does framing their questions in that way seem to attract a large number of readers and secondary commentary?

The economically-minded answer would probably note that these kinds of headlines are more attention-grabbing, and that the ultimate goal of any publication funded by advertising is to grab attention. I wouldn’t doubt that this is a contributing factor, and I’m happy that at least in the case of Marche’s article, he nevertheless finds a more nuanced position.

But I also wonder if technological determinism has seeped so far into the popular collective conscious that it is difficult for journalists and the public to think any other way about technology and society. This kind of framing tends to betray an underlying assumption that technology “impacts” society in a kind of one-way, deterministic relationship. Authors may debate whether those impacts are good or bad, but they tend to assume that those impacts will always be inevitable, deterministic, and irreversible.

In the introduction to the classic book Does Technology Drive History?, Merritt Roe Smith argues that Americans in particular have always been attracted to this way of thinking because our national identity has always been wrapped up with technology and the ideology of progress. Our greatest heroes have been inventors and industrialists, not artists or humanitarians, and we commonly attribute our current global hegemony to our technological prowess.

But Americans have also become more willing since the 1960s to question the supposed benefits of new innovations, and to enquire about the often undisclosed costs. Nevertheless, this seems to happen only after the innovation becomes mass-adopted. When Google first appeared on the scene, journalists praised it for its clean look, efficiency, and uncanny ability to find what it was you were really looking for. We rooted for them as the up-and-coming underdog, and we rejoiced in their algorithms’ abilities to bring some kind of order to the ever-growing morass of information on the web. But once it became so ubiquitous that it transmogrified into its own verb, we began to see articles like Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Why do we frame the questions in these ways? And why do articles that use this kind of framing generate such interest and secondary commentary? Do they poke at some deep-seated anxieties that we have about technological change? Let me know what you think.

We actually have become more isolated (in terms of strong ties) during the same period that social media has arisen, so we assume that the latter has caused the former, even though evidence to the contrary is legion.

Online socialization really can’t entirely replace face-to-face interaction, so we also assume that increased use of social networking causes increased feelings of isolation, even though people who are social online are also social offline.

“Just like we convert text (visual) into language in our head (which is all oral in the brain), we need to convert mediated-interaction to that visceral kind of sociality in our brain. And not everyone can do this equally well [a condition she calls ‘cyberasociality’]. And people who are cyberasocial are driving this discussion.”

See her post for more details, including links to primary research that backs up what she is saying.